St. Augustine, in a very interesting passage ("Confessions”, viii. 9, 21), remarks upon the fact that, when the mind commands the body, obedience is instantaneous, but that when it commands itself, it meets with resistance.  “The mind commands that the mind shall will—­it is one and the same mind, and it does not obey.”  He finds the reason; the mind does not absolutely and entirely ("ex toto”) will the thing, and so it does not absolutely and entirely command it.  “There is nothing strange after all in this,” he says, “partly to will, partly not to will; but it is a weakness of the mind that it does not arise in its entirety, uplifted by truth, because it is borne down by habit.  Thus there are two Wills, because one of them is not complete.”

The same thought is to be traced in the teaching of Jesus.  It is implied in what he says about prayer.  There is a want of faith, a half-heartedness about men’s prayers; they pray as Augustine says he himself did:  “Give me chastity and continence, but not now” (Conf, viii. 7, 17).  That is not what Jesus means by prayer—­the utterance of the half-Will.  Nor is it this sort of surrender to God that Jesus calls for—­no, the question is, how thoroughly is a man going to put himself into God’s hands?  Does he mean to be God’s up to the cross and beyond?  Does he enlist absolutely on God’s terms without a bargain with God, prepared to accept God’s will, whatever it is, whether it squares with his liking or not? (cf.  Luke 17:7-10).  Are his own desires finally out of the reckoning?  Does he, in fact, deny—­negate—­himself (Mark 8:34)?  Jesus calls for disciples, with questions so penetrating on his lips.  What a demand to make of men!  What faith, too, in men it shows, that he can ask all this with no hint of diminished seriousness!

Jesus is the great believer in men, as we saw in the choice of his twelve.  To that group of disciples he trusts the supremest task men ever had assigned to them.  Not many wise, not many mighty, Paul found at Corinth (1 Cor. 1:26); and it has always been so.  Is it not still the gist of the Gospel that Jesus believes in the writer and the reader of these lines—­trusts them with the propagation of God’s Kingdom, incredible commission?  Jesus was always at leisure for individuals; this was the natural outcome of his faith in men.  What else is the meaning of his readiness to spend himself in giving the utmost spiritual truth—­no easy task, as experience shows us—­even to a solitary listener?  If we accept what he tells us of God, we can believe that the individual is worth all that Jesus did and does for him, but hardly otherwise.  His gift of discovering interest in uninteresting people, says Phillips Brooks, was an intellectual habit that he gave to his disciples.  We think too much “like men”; he would have us “think like God,” and think better of odd units and items of humanity than statesmen and statisticians are apt to do.  It has been pointed out lately